"It's all very perplexing to a fundamental-value guy. Yahoo! gets its revenue from advertising—a wobbly support structure, at best. Yet Yahoo!'s $19 billion market value puts it in the same neighborhood as another ad vehicle, CBS Corp. And CBS will end 1998 with revenue that is 37 times that of Yahoo!.
"It isn't good for the economy or the market what's happening here," says Manuel P. Asensio of Asensio & Co., an investment banking firm in New York. "What I find so unprincipled is that very seasoned, professional firms are touting these stocks. They should know better."
Asensio is taking a harsh look at Amazon.com, a moneylosing on-line bookseller whose $10 billion market worth puts it at five times the value of Barnes & Noble, a chain with 1,025 stores in the U.S., a new on-line business and a deal to acquire the industry's largest wholesaler, Ingram Book Group.
forbes.com
Article Date: Dec. 28, 1998
Actual current market cap of Yahoo: $28.3 billion
Actual current market cap of Amazon: $16.3 billion
Odd, the discrepancy between the market caps reported in this article ($19b and $10b, respectively), and the actual current mkt caps.
Is the author ignorant, or was this article simply written a couple of weeks ago, when YHOO and AMZN were priced much lower?
And just this past week I saw an article linked on this thread which was dated Dec. 21, which cited Amazon's "5.6 billion market cap"
No wonder nobody cares about fundamentals anymore. Few even know what the actual fundamental numbers are. |
